No it wont affect it to be honest... not in a single card config, but your low overclock of your Q6600 probably would bottleneck it

The GTX 295 is basically two GTX260's in sli.... you already have one... so why not get another to get the same performance as a GTX? and with the leftover cash get yourself a decent SLI mobo that can help clock your Q6600 a bit higher?

Also with your screen resolution youd be fine with a single card solution like a HD4870 or HD4890

still what youre buying is a graphics card connected in sli with two chips on it... and paying a helluva a lot for it
For a lot less, just keep the GTX260 and get another one... same performance and you have money left over for something else... perhaps a nice speedy SSD drive
just a thought

PCI-e v1 is half the bandwidth of v2; so a 16x v1 lane is only like having a 8x v2 slot....that wont be much good with a 295 as the two cards are effectively getting 4x and that wont do performance any good...the more bandwidth you give to the GTX295 the better off you'll be.

Upgrade your board to a P45 chipset ($100 - 150~) and grab another 260 ($160~) and it will be a far better upgrade path and will allow you to enjoy the full potential of SLI GTX260's.

Ninja Edit: 680i isn't all too bad, but I would get the 780i as it offers everything the 790i does (almost) aside from DDR3 support...and if you wanted DDR3 the obvious choice is to upgrade to a i7 platform.

No it wont affect it to be honest... not in a single card config, but your low overclock of your Q6600 probably would bottleneck it

The GTX 295 is basically two GTX260's in sli.... you already have one... so why not get another to get the same performance as a GTX? and with the leftover cash get yourself a decent SLI mobo that can help clock your Q6600 a bit higher?

Also with your screen resolution youd be fine with a single card solution like a HD4870 or HD4890

Click to expand...

GTX295 is basically two GTX275's in SLI actually...

In SOME games PCIe 16x v1/v1.1 will give lower FPS compared to PCIe 16x v2. ATI cards are less susceptible to the PCIe 16x version then the GT200 based nvidia cards.

Over time drivers get better and better and this games get special treatment in the driver so the difference will be smaller with newer drivers. But there are differences. Especially on the GTX295, that is monstrous.

Look around the net for a list of games that will give you lower performance on v1/v1.1. There are reviews out there (with the 4870X2 and the GTX280/285) that tackle this exact issue. But once a review is written it is already wrong since the next driver update can invalidate all previous test results.

So basically if I buy a GTX 295 and put it in by existing board I should not experience any loss in performance? This is so confusing as there are so many conflicing opinions about PCI-e 1.0 vs PCI-e 2.0

in most cases you wont, and even in the situations you do, it'd be negligible difference.(1~2%~ish)
and a single GTX260 costs 300AUD here,(240USD according to www.xe.com) ppl really should stop giving prices for different countries.

edit: oh btw, tbh, at 1680*1050, there's no point to upgrade for now.. i'd suggest to wait a bit for higher graphics demanding game titles coming up. and the get a dx11 card upgrade instead

As I said before, just SOME games are affected, and drivers improve every day.

We definitely see that our new X48 motherboard’s PCIe 2.0 specification makes some solid differences performance-wise over our PCIe 1.0 P-35 motherboard but it clearly depends on which card is used and what game is played. PCIe express 2.0 is not so critical for 4870-512MB class video cards but becomes more increasingly noticeable with GTX280 and 4870-X2 - and especially crossfire-X3 - when it scales well.